|
CDs
by Weldon Irvine
Liberated Brother /
Sinbad /
Spirit Man /
Time Capsule /
Cosmic Vortex /
Keyboards
Wild DJs Smile
Time Capsule /
Music Is the Key /
The Price of Freedom
* *
* * *
Weldon Irvine Dead at 58
(October 27, 1943 – April 9, 2002)
The
highly respected composer-playwright-pianist Weldon Irvine met
an untimely death under tragic circumstances this past April 9.
His body was not identified by authorities until April 17. He
was 59.
Wake
for his family and friends was held Sunday, April 28, 2002, from
2pm to 8pm. Funeral services was set for Monday, April 29,
beginning at 9:30am. Both services will take place at the J.
Foster Phillips Funeral Home, located at 179-24 Linden
Boulevard, in Jamaica, Queens (718/526-5656).
|
Born
in 1942 and bred in Virginia, after graduating from Hampton
Institute (now Hampton University), where he majored in
literature and minored in music, he moved to New York City in
1965, forming his own seventeen-piece big band, and was soon
commissioned to work on Lorraine Hansberry's
To Be Young, Gifted and Black, for which production he wrote the title tune.
"Nina Simone wrote 'To Be Young,
Gifted and Black' with the pianist Weldon Irvine Jnr.
[To Be Young, Gifted and Black
was a play composed after her death by her
husband
Robert Nemiroff from a collection of her work,
correspondence, and interviews]
|
 |
Throughout
the 60s and 70s, Irvine continued recording and performing in
clubs and festivals, and premiered his first blockbuster musical
at the Billie Holiday Theatre, in Brooklyn, Young, Gifted,
and Broke. It ran for eight months, won four prestigious AUDELCO
Awards, and signaled the beginning of a decade-long relationship
with that theatre, in which he produced well over twenty
subsequent musical dramas.
As
he transitioned himself into becoming an elder of Hip Hop
culture, many of the more politically conscious artists in that
arena, including Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Q-Tip, sought him out
as teacher and mentor. As well, he was highly respected among
political activist organizations and cultural institutions
working in the African American community, including the
December 12th Movement, Sistas' Place, Patrice Lumumba
Coalition, the Afrikan Poetry Theatre, where he began the
process of founding a church for artists, and among radio
personalities Minister Conrad Muhammad, Clayton Riley, James
Mtume, and Elombe Brath, among others.
Known
in jazz and poetry circles simply as Weldon and within the world
of Hip Hop as Master Wel, Mr. Irvine's skills as a musician and
lyricist throughout his career were well demonstrated in just
about every genre of African American music. With well over 500
compositions to his credit, much of which has been recorded on
albums, audio tapes or CDs, he was the producer, arranger and
conductor for an inestimable number of concerts, festival
presentations, and staged musicals that focused on each of those
genres: Gospel music, Rhythm and Blues, Be Bop, Hard Bop,
Fusion, Funk, Free Jazz and Hip Hop. He has worked with such
Jazz notables as Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Stanley Turrentine,
Bill Jacobs, with Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway, as well as
with poets Louis Reyes Rivera, George Edward Tait, Rich Bartee
and the Griot Trio, and with such Rappers and Spoken Word
Artists as KRS-One, Grand Master Flash, Gang Starr, Big Daddy
Kane, Ice Cube, Black Star, Tree, Rah Goddess, and Mums the
Schemer, to name just a few.
As
the 21st century entered, he produced and financed THE AMADOU
PROJECT, a CD commemoration of the 1999 slaying of the young and
unarmed Amadou Diallo, who was shot to death by four New York
City police. A day after Diallo was shot at 41 times by four
white New York city cops, Irvine began gathering together poets
and hip-hop artists who shared his sense of outrage. The
assembled talent recorded the album The Price Of Freedom.
"I
said, 'This has got to stop and I'm going to use my art form as
a vehicle to address the shooting,' " Irvine says from his
New York home. "I know the topic is not one that people are
going to party over, but I did try to include some things to
lighten up the mood. Some songs don't talk about Amadou at
all." The CD features a host of Spoken Word Artists,
Rappers and MCs, including close associates Don Blackman and
Carla Cook, as well as voice-overs by the parents of young
Diallo.
Popular
among hip-hop artists -- Tribe Called Quest, Ice Cube, KRS-One
and many others have sampled his soul-jazz-funk material from
the '60s and '70s -- Irvine explains why so few rappers have
expressed their anger at the shooting in their music.
"There
was a resurgence in '60s sentiment in the early '80s with groups
like Public Enemy, Poor Righteous Teachers, Brand Nubian and KRS-One,
but then you had the advent of gangsta rap and that made the
labels decide to kill conscious rap and push gangsta rap,"
says Irvine, who wrote the anthem Young, Gifted And Black for
Nina Simone in '68.
"So,
many of the young rappers got disconnected from a tradition of
protest and decided to rap about mayhem in order to get
paid."
Irvine
says the music world needs more people like Muhammad Ali -- the
classic civil disobedient, who knew he faced the possibility of
never boxing again professionally for refusing to fight in
Vietnam in the '60s.
Taking
musical risks is nothing new for the Virginia native. Well
before the terms 'acid jazz' and 'rare groove' were coined,
Irvine was doing it.
"I
called it rock-jazz at the time," Irvine says. "I
would write a bassline that James Brown would be comfortable
with, and have an R&B drum pattern going with that bassline.
I would then borrow a melody from my jazz experience and put it
together."
Weldon's
musical influences -- Ray Charles, Duke Ellington and Horace
Silver, to name a few -- and eclectic taste manifested
themselves in his warm, sunny, soulful sound.
"It's
not like I started off with Chopin and never moved out of
classical, or I started with blues and never moved outside of
B.B. King, or started with Coltrane and never moved out of
be-bop," Irvine says. "I was dealing with all three,
and then some."
Irvine
-- who appears on Black Star's and Mos Def's brilliant albums,
and is giving Q-Tip and Common piano lessons -- is excited by
the number of hip-hop artists gravitating toward a more musical
sound.
Quite
a few MCs and hip-hop producers really want to play instruments,
and perhaps they would be playing if music-education programs
hadn't been taken out of the (American) public-school
system," he says. "I think it's pretty appalling to
take art out of education, but be that as it may, I'm trying to
fill in the gap."
He
adds: "I'm certain that groups like The Roots, Common,
Erykah Badu will become more influential and inspire some of the
people you don't like to change their sound and direction."
"My
sympathy and condolences go out to the community here, to his
family, and to the international community as well," said
Mr. Saikou Diallo, Amadou's father. "We have lost a great
man." Before his untimely departure,
Weldon was the recipient of a SPIRIT AWARD, given to him by the
Medgar Evers Student Association and Akeem Productions, this
past February, 2002.
| "Many
of the young rappers got disconnected from a tradition
of protest and decided to rap about mayhem in order to
get paid" Weldon
Irvine |
 |
Weldon
Irvine sits at the piano and starts to play. After getting a
feel for the instrument (a Steinway grand), he launches into a
survey of piano styles, from classical to bop. Punctuated by
commentary, his rousing history lesson includes a classical-sounding improv, along with snippets of Fats Domino, Ray
Charles, Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk, and Bud Powell.
"Everything I learned I never forgot," he says, at one
point. "All the styles and all the school, it's still
there." He turns and grins. "Isn't that
fantastic?" he asks.
In
Irvine, the styles have mingled, mixed, and morphed into a rare
breed of music, a funky fusion buoyed by a spiritual vibe that's
as uplifting and expansive as it is deep and inclusive. As a
result, he occupies sacred space somewhere between Alice
Coltrane (and various other Impulse artists) and Stevie Wonder
on the continuum of African-American music. With lofty ambition
and earthy bravado, he's filled that space with a unique blend
of jazz, blues, gospel, Latin, soul, funk, and hip-hop.
Over
the past forty years, Irvine has crafted an enduring body of
work. With Nina Simone, he co-wrote the anthemic "To Be
Young, Gifted, and Black," and his songs have been covered
by the likes of Aretha Franklin, Donny Hathaway, and Freddie
Hubbard. His solo records, especially his 1970s albums for RCA,
have been reissued and rediscovered by a new generation of rare
groove aficionados and hip-hop heads. Jamiroquai recorded a
version of "We Gettin' Down" in 1995, and A Tribe
Called Quest, KRS-1, and Ice Cube have sampled Irvine's music.
"Weldon
is the man," says Jamiroquai. "[He is] probably the
greatest fusionist in the business.... His stuff is
excellent." "Weldon doesn't live by any
boundaries," says Q-Tip, Tribe's former frontman.
"He's very liberated and free."
"He's
a badass," says dj Andrew Jervis, who doubles as
vice-president of Ubiquity Records, a San Francisco-based label
that distributed Irvine's Weldon & the Kats disc in 1992.
"The first time I ever dj'ed in New York City, I was on a
bill with Weldon Irvine, Groove Collective, and a host of other
new jazz cats. He was awesome. He was representing the old
school, and he owned the stage! He still is awesome. Check him
out arranging strings and things on Mos Def's album."
Most
recently, Irvine has been closely associated with the rapper. He
played keyboards on Black Star's "Astronomy (8th
Light)" and contributed mightily to Mos' debut, Black On
Both Sides. "Weldon is a true individual," Mos told
Vibrations earlier this year. "He's one of those rare
individuals you meet in life who knows exactly who he is, and he
doesn't allow anybody to sell him any propaganda about who he
is.... Like me, he also sees hip-hop as an extension of
everything else that we listen to and love so much in American
culture. Whether it's jazz, blues, soul, or rock and roll, he
gets it all.... He is an artist without borders."
After
his impromptu performance in my living room, Weldon and I
adjourn to the kitchen for a healthy meal (he requested salad,
fruits, and vegetables only). Wearing a black baseball cap,
white t-shirt, and black pants, he bows his head in prayer
before eating. He is impeccably polite and, at times,
unsettlingly direct. When told of Jamiroquai's assessment of his
talents, he doesn't flinch. "I don't back up from his
description of me," he says. "I don't brag about it,
but I'll say very passively that I was [fusing various genres]
before anybody I know. I've been doing it since the
Fifties."
Irvine
was born in Hampton, Virginia. His parents divorced when he was
young, and both his mother and father remarried. He was raised
by his grandparents. His grandmother played the upright bass,
classically. Originally a farmer, Irvine's grandfather enrolled
at Hampton Institute, got hired as a faculty member, and
eventually was named dean of the men's college.
Irvine
grew up on the college grounds, where his grandfather's position
cloaked him in the privileged and protected embrace of black,
southern aristocracy. He lived in a mansion, wore knickerbocker
pants, and read etiquette books. He was served tea and crumpets
by house servants who referred to him as Master Weldon. "It
was almost like a Victorian upbringing," Irvine recalls,
"and it instilled in me a sense of history that's very,
very rare. Most people, regardless of their ethnicity, don't
have the extremes of experience I have."
After
his grandfather retired, the family moved off campus to what
Irvine calls "the ghetto." There, he was targeted by
street thugs who beat him up every day. He was nine years old.
"I was such a wimp," he says, "that guys were
bringing their little brothers over to practice fighting on
me."Eventually, he learned to defend himself first with a
baseball bat, and then with his fists--and the beatings stopped.
Musically,
he was a boy soprano that could sing like Frankie Lyman. But
having his tonsils removed changed that. He was left with a
nasal voice that made him reluctant to sing, and he turned to
shooting pool and playing sports, especially baseball and
basketball. He believed he'd never do anything musical again.
But
one day, he was hanging out with a friend's band as the group
went over horn charts. A trombone part proved especially
difficult, and no one could hear it clearly. Except Irvine. It
was crystal clear to him, and the bandleader asked him to write
it out. So he went home, opened the encyclopedia and taught
himself to write music. "That put my hands on the piano and
they haven't left since," he says.
At
his grandfather's alma mater, he majored in English literature,
but after a friend turned him on to an Art Blakey record
featuring Horace Silver on piano, he was hooked on jazz. "I
went to college to appease my grandparents," he says,
"but I devoted most of my time to playing jazz."
He
moved to New York, in 1965, and quickly immersed himself in the
city's jazz scene. "One of my first gigs was with Kenny
Dorham and Joe Henderson's big band," Irvine recalls.
"My friend went to audition for the fourth trumpet chair,
and he brought [pianist] George Cables and I along for moral
support. He auditioned and got the job. Cedar Walton was playing
piano, and George and I noticed that he left after an
hour-and-a-half, even though it was a two-hour rehearsal."
Irvine
urged Cables to take Walton's seat and play. "Are you
crazy?" Cables shot back. "That bench belongs to Cedar
Walton."
"Do
you see Cedar Walton on it?" Irvine asked.
He
got out his watch. "If you're not on that bench by the time
this second hand goes around once, I'll be on that bench."
Cables
hesitated, and a minute later Irvine was on the bench. By the
end of rehearsal, he had a job.
"Kenny
Dorham and Joe Henderson couldn't afford Herbie Hancock or McCoy
Tyner, and Cedar wasn't always showing up because he had a
[drug] problem," says Irvine, "so the guys in the band
endured me. But I would be the first guy at rehearsal, I would
set up chairs, and pass out music. After rehearsal, I would
clean up after the guys."
Irvine
recalls another memorable audition, this one in 1968. A friend
who was playing with Nina Simone called to say the chanteuse was
trying out organists for an ensemble that was hitting the road
in three days. Was Irvine interested? "I went to the
audition and got there an hour late," he says. "I
walked in and said, `Ms. Simone, I'm sorry I'm late.' She said,
`I don't want to hear that shit. Sit down and turn the damn
thing up so I can hear your ass.' She was in the middle of a
twelve bar blues in B flat. I turned up the organ and jumped in
there with one chord, and she said, `Stop! You have perfect
pitch.'"
Simone
sent everyone out of the room, except Irvine. She looked him in
the eyes and asked a series of questions, some of which were
quite personal. She must have been pleased with his answers
because he got the job. "I only played one chord for
her," Irvine says, shaking his head."It was
amazing."
For
the next three years, Irvine functioned as Simone's organist,
bandleader, arranger, road manager, and sometimes, co-writer.
They wrote "Revolution" together, and Irvine's
"How Long Must I Wonder" appeared on Simone's Here
Comes the Sun record. Their greatest collaboration was, without
a doubt, "To Be Young, Gifted, and Black."
As
Irvine tells it, Simone was friends with the playwright Lorraine
Hansberry, who wrote A Raisin In the Sun. When Hansberry's
autobiography was turned into a Broadway play, Simone attended
the premier of the production, which was titled To Be Young,
Gifted, and Black, and was inspired to write a song. She asked
Irvine to write the lyrics. She gave him the title, played the
song's melody, and told Irvine she wanted lyrics that "will
make black children all over the world feel good about
themselves forever." That was his assignment.
For
nearly two weeks, he struggled to come up with something.
"It was the only time in my life that I wrestled with
creating," he says. "Usually, I just open the door and
it comes."
On the fourteenth day, it came. He remembers it vividly. "I
was in my Ford Galaxy on my way to the bus station to pick up a
girlfriend from down south," he recalls. "I was
stopped at a red light at Forty-First Street and Eighth Avenue
when all the words came to me at once. I tied up traffic at that
red light for fifteen minutes, as I scribbled on three napkins
and a matchbook cover. A whole bunch of irate taxi drivers were
leaning on their horns. I wrote it, put it in the glove
compartment, picked up the girl, and didn't look at it until she
got back on the bus to go home."
When
he finally read it, he was awestruck. He remembers thinking,
"I didn't write this. God wrote it through me."
In
fact, much of Irvine's work seems to be the product of divine
intervention. Although he refuses to label himself a Christian,
he closely identifies with the teachings of Jesus. He's also
studied comparative religion and seems well versed on a variety
of holy books, especially the Qu'ran, Torah, and Bible. "I
was born spiritual," he says, matter-of-factly. "Have
you heard my song `Music Is the Key?'"
He
recites the first verse, "Music is the key/The key to
harmony and/Melody is king/The beat is everything so/Come and
join the band/And find true understanding/Vibrations all
around/Create the sound."
Then,
the chorus, "Why don't you sing/Try harmonizing/Music is
the key/Why not be free."
And
then, part of the third verse, "Now's the time to start/To
liberate your heartbeat/To the Lord above/Submit to love."
He
follows up the recitation with a quote from Genesis. "In
the beginning, God created heaven and earth," he says.
"Created is the first verb in the Bible. God is the first
proper noun.... And God created man in his own image. To me,
what that means is that everybody walking around here isn't
trying to be the next Miles Davis, the next Picasso, or the next
Rembrandt, so artists must be the chosen people. Artists have
preeminence over others, because artists are the only ones
creating. And that's like God. Now, the question is what will
the artist create? Will it be something that will edify and be
pleasing to the creator, or will it be something that will be
considered blasphemous?"
Irvine's
material speaks for itself, and the titles alone reflect his
artistic, often Afro-centric world view. Songs such as
"Walk That Walk, Talk That Talk," "Love Your
Brother," "Let Yourself Be Free," and the
aforementioned "Music Is the Key" on records titled
Liberated Brother, Time Capsule, In Harmony, Cosmic Vortex
(Justice Divine), Spirit Man, and Sinbad are soulful, sublimely
funky manifestations of his beliefs. "It was my intention
that my spiritual path would be apparent to anybody who's
following my body of work," he says. "I wanted people
to see that I was somebody who wasn't just talking about shake
your booty, let's have a good time. Every now and then I'll do a
fun song, but I'm far too serious about how messed up the world
is to trivialize my talents by catering to the dictates of the
commercial marketplace."
Irvine
didn't somberly walk the spiritual path, he strutted down it.
Stepping to a heady mix of jazz, blues, gospel, Latin, soul, and
funk with versatile players such as Marcus Miller, Lenny White,
Billy Cobham, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Omar Hakim, and Don
Blackman in tow he made a joyful noise that was difficult to
categorize. The cross-hybridization may have baffled the
executives at RCA the label dropped him in 1976, after the
release of Sinbad--but it was nothing new to Irvine. He'd been
doing it since the 1950s. "I was mixing rock and roll with
jazz when I was in high school," he says. "I called it
rock-jazz."
At
the time, he was mixing r&b rhythms on the bottom with
melodies that were using primarily pentatonic scales. "The
blues scale is a minor pentatonic scale with an added flatted
fifth," he explains. "You can take a Horace Silver
melody--a guy that was known for jazz but who wrote things that
were kind of bluesy or soulful--and go with that. You get a
four/four string bass playing and that's one thing, but if you
take a Fender bass and have the drummer do two and four on the
snare, instead of the hi-hat, you have r&b. It's just where
you emphasize the backbeat.
"That
kind of thing is very much in vogue now, in different
variations. They call it so many things. If you go to London,
they call it acid jazz. Or you got a guy like D'Angelo. It's
even in hip-hop now, with artists like Mos Def and Common,
people that are working in various idioms."
These
days, Irvine is making his presence felt in the hip-hop
community. His keyboard and string arrangements added both scope
and maturity to Black On Both Sides, and he now tours regularly
with Mos. "Hip-hop is making me more visible and more
viable that at any time in my career," he notes.
Unlike
many of his contemporaries, he promoted hip-hop as a vital art
form from the jump. He professes admiration for Wu-Tang Clan and
compares groundbreaking mc's such as Rakim to jazz titans like
Charlie Parker. "I've always been a big fan, just like any
kid with gold teeth and pants hanging off his behind," he
says. "The beats that these guys were producing blew my
mind.... I've always accepted it as music."
Irvine
was so inspired that he began rhyming himself. Using the name Master
Wel, a reference to his aristocratic upbringing, he has released
a pair of hip-hop-influenced discs. 1997's Spoken
Melodies--featuring Saul Williams and other poets/rappers--and
1999's The Price of Freedom a searing indictment of police
brutality that included cameos by Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and
Q-Tip--reflect his passion for the music.
The
57-year-old Irvine says he honed his skills by hanging out with
rappers half his age and paying dues. He vividly remembers
signing up for open mic nights and talent shows and being asked,
"Is your son gonna rap? Your grandson? Your cousin?"
Within earshot, people snickered, "Hey, grandpa's gonna
rap."
But
he persevered. "I've worked at it for fifteen years,"
he says, "and I'm so pleased when I see the reaction of
real hip-hop heads when they see me pick up the mic and start to
rhyme. They're shocked that I'm doing it, but when they start
bopping and responding to my call and response, that tells me I
have the capabilities."
To
illustrate his point, he starts rhyming. He taps out a beat on
the kitchen table with his right hand and does a piece called
"Jamming On the One." Towards the end, he freestyles a
rhyme that references Horace Silver and various subjects we'd
covered in our conversation. It's impressive.
More
impressive is his commitment, as an elder, to teaching jazz and
music theory to the hop-hop generation. He currently gives piano
lessons to Q-Tip and Common, and he mentions that Erykah Badu
and Doug E. Fresh are interested in studying, as well. "As
these hip-hoppers get more proficient with jazz," he says,
"they are going to start making all-instrumental songs and
improvising on their instruments. That's going to blow a lot of
people's minds." They'll be following in Irvine's
footsteps.
"I
often just sit and listen to him," says Q-Tip,
"because he teaches truth. He's my mentor."
"When
I grow up, I want to be like Weldon," says Mos.
I
ask the master what he thinks of such comments. "I'm just
happy to have the opportunity to share what I have with these
guys," he says. "That's the greatest blessing of
all."
* * * *
*
Weldon Irvine
By Jason Ankeny
All
Music Guide
Keyboardist Weldon Irvine
looms large in the pantheon of jazz-funk, profoundly influencing
the subsequent generations of hip-hop artists for whom he served
as collaborator and mentor. Born in Hampton, VA, on October 27,
1943, Irvine was raised by his grandparents in the wake of his
parents' divorce, and while his grandmother played standup bass
in a series of regional classical ensembles, her husband served
as dean of the men's college at Hampton Institute. Irvine began
playing piano as a teen, and while he later majored in
literature at Hampton, music remained his first love, especially
after discovering jazz.
Upon settling in New York
City in 1965, he was recruited into Kenny Dorham and Joe
Henderson's big band, a year later [1966] signing on with Nina
Simone as the legendary singer's organist, bandleader, arranger,
and road manager. The two also wrote songs together, and after
seeing a performance of playwright Lorraine Hansberry's To Be
Young, Gifted and Black,
Simone instructed Irvine to compose lyrics for a song of the
same title. After two weeks of writer's block, the words came to
him in a flash of inspiration, and the finished song would later
merit cover versions by performers including Aretha Franklin,
Stevie Wonder, and
Donny
Hathaway on its way to becoming the best known of his
approximately 500 published compositions.
After splitting from
Simone, Irvine formed his own 17-piece group that at different
times included the likes of Billy Cobham, Randy Brecker, Bennie
Maupin, and Don Blackman; in 1973, the Nodlew label issued his
first headlining session,
Liberated Brother, followed a year later by
Time Capsule. Over the course of these records the
keyboardist truly hit his stride, honing not only his singular
yet skilled fusion of jazz, funk, soul, blues, and gospel—a
direct antecedent of what would later be known as acid jazz—but
also the social consciousness and impassioned spiritually that
further defined his career.
In addition to subsequent
LPs like 1975's
Spirit Man and the next year's Sinbad, Irvine
also began writing musicals for the stage, and in 1977 New
York's Billie Holiday Theatre produced his Young, Gifted and
Broke, which proved both a commercial and critical smash
that won a series of awards during its eight-month run. The
Billie Holiday Theatre also mounted more than 20 of Irvine's
other musicals, most notable among them The Vampire and
the Dentist, The Will, and Keep It Real.
But while Irvine focused on
his stage projects, his recording career fell by the wayside,
and following 1979's Sisters he did not headline a new LP
for another 15 years. In that time his work was rediscovered and
praised by a growing number of politically minded young rappers,
especially Boogie Down Productions, A Tribe Called Quest, and
Leaders of the New School, all of whom sampled his vintage
recordings. Unlike many artists of his generation, Irvine
embraced these upstarts in turn, in 1994 recording the
hip-hop-inspired
Music Is the Key for the indie label Luv'N'Haight.
Three years later he cut
Spoken Melodies, even rapping himself under the name Master
Wel, and that same year lent keyboard and string arrangements to
Mos Def's
Black on Both Sides; he even gave piano lessons to
rappers Q-Tip and Common. In 1999 Irvine called on Mos Def,
Talib Kweli, and Q-Tip for
The Price of Freedom, a searing indictment of police
brutality inspired by the death of Amadou Diallo, a defenseless
African immigrant murdered in a hail of gunfire by New York City
cops.
On April 9, 2002, Irvine committed suicide
outside a New York City office complex— he was just 58 years
old.—Amazon
* * * *
*
Nina
Simone at a Harlem Festival
(1969)
/
Donny Hathaway. Young, Gifted, and Black
(Live)
Bob Andy &
Marcia, Young, Gifted & Black
* * * *
*
|
To Be Young,
Gifted and Black
Lyrics by Weldon Irvine
To be young, gifted and black,
Oh what a lovely precious dream
To be young, gifted and black,
Open your heart to what I mean
In the whole world you know
There are billion boys and girls
Who are young, gifted and black,
And that's a fact!
You are young, gifted and black
We must begin to tell our young
There's a world waiting for you
This is a quest that's just begun
When you feel really low
Yeah, there's a great truth you should know
When you're young, gifted and black
Your soul's intact
Young, gifted and black
How I long to know the truth
There are times when I look back
And I am haunted by my youth
Oh but my joy of today
Is that we can all be proud to say
To be young, gifted and black
Is where it's at |
Credits:
Irvine, Weldon (Songwriter); Simone, Nina (Songwriter); EMI
GROVE PARK MUSIC INC (Publisher); NINANDY MUSIC CO
(Publisher)
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Simone asked Irvine to
contribute the lyrics. 'It was the only time in my life that
I wrestled with creating," he recalled. When the words
finally came, Irvine was in his car. "I tied up traffic at
that red light for 15 minutes as I scribbled on three
napkins and a matchbook cover'" (Robert
Webb, "Double Take")
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*
"To Be Young, Gifted
and Black" is a song by Nina Simone with lyrics by Weldon
Irvine. It was written in memory of Simone's late friend
Lorraine Hansberry, author of the play
Raisin in the Sun.
The song was originally recorded by Simone for her 1970
album Black Gold; released as a single, it became a
Top Ten R&B hit and a Civil Rights anthem. Notable cover
versions of the song were recorded by Donny Hathaway (on his
1970 album Everything Is Everything), Aretha Franklin
(on her 1972 album Young, Gifted and Black) and Bob
and Marcia (whose 1970 recording reached number 5 in the UK
charts).
Elton John recorded a
version of "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" prior to his solo
success. Intended to be released as a low budget sound-alike
version of the original, it was later reissued on the
compilation album Covers as Sung by Elton John.
Wikipedia
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*
After her death, her
ex-husband Robert Nemiroff adapted a collection of her work,
correspondence, and interviews together in To Be Young,
Gifted and Black. It opened Off-Broadway with an eight
month run at the Cherry Lane. The same year To Be Young,
Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words
adapted by Robert Nemiroff was published [1970]—
“Lorraine
Hansberry (1930-1965): A Brief Biography” by Tammy Burris
The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window ran for 110
performances on Broadway and closed the night she died.
Her ex-husband Robert Nemiroff became the executor for
several unfinished manuscripts. He added minor changes
to complete the play
Les Blancs, which Julius
Lester termed her best work, and he adapted many of her
writings into the play,
To Be Young, Gifted and Black,
which was the longest-running
Off-Broadway
play of the 1968-1969 season. It appeared in book form
the following year under the title, To Be Young,
Gifted and Black: Lorraine Hansberry in Her Own Words
[1970].—
Wikipedia
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*
1969 was rife with
turmoil and hopeful new beginnings. The Vietnam War was in
full swing and instituted the first draft since World War
II… The Beatles made their last public concert appearance…
James Earl Ray plead guilty to assassinating Martin Luther
King, Jr… Golda Meir became the first female prime minister
of Israel… And a few weeks after the Stonewall riots, man
took his first tentative steps on the moon. We conclude our
Pride series with a look back at the Off-Broadway. .
. .
pr
Racial conflict was
explored in Charles Gardone’s drama
No Place to Be Somebody, which had recently opened
at The Public Theatre. For this work, playwright Charles
Gardone became the first African-American author to be
awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and No Place was the
first time the Prize was given to an Off-Broadway
production. At the Cherry Lane Theatre, Lorraine Hansberry’s
husband adapted many of his late wife’s writings to create
To Be Young, Gifted and Black, the longest-running
play of the 1968-1969 Off-Broadway season. Billy Dee
Williams was seen in
Ceremonies in Dark Old Men, Lonne Elder III’s family
drama that unfolded at a barbershop in Harlem.—Off-Broadway
Pride Part III, Stonewall-Era Time Machine, Blog posted June
27, 2009
* * * *
*
 |
Lorraine Hansberry
(1930-1965):
The
granddaughter of a freed slave Lorraine
Hansberry became a spokesperson for black
Americans. Her writings reflected her fight for
black civil rights, and her views against racism
and sexual and statutory discrimination. Due to
her short life her legacy left only a few works
but all with dramatic effect on all, no matter
race or color, who came in touch with them.
Lorraine
Vivian Hansberry was born May 19, 1930 in
Chicago, Illinois the youngest by seven years,
of four children. |
Her father, Carl A.
Hansberry, was a successful real estate broker, who later
contributed large sums of money to NAACP and the Urban League.
Her mother, Nannie Perry, was a schoolteacher who entered
politics and became a ward committeewoman (Metzger 146). . . .
In 1963 Lorraine Hansberry
became very active in the civil rights movement in the South.
She was a field organizer for CORE. Along with several other
celebrated people among them Harry Belefonte, Lena Horne, and
James Baldwin they met with the then attorney general Robert
Kennedy challenging his position on civil rights (221). In 1964,
she wrote
The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality.
During this time period she was diagnosed with cancer and
divorced her husband although they continued their literary
collaboration (253). Her second play
The Sign in Sidney
Bustein's Window opened on Broadway the same year. It
received modest success. Lorraine Hansberry died of cancer on
January 12, 1964 at the age of 34. The Sign in Sidney Bustein's
Window closed on Broadway the same day.—
“Lorraine
Hansberry (1930-1965): A Brief Biography” by Tammy Burris
* * * *
*
Lorraine Hansberry was the fourth child
born to Carl Augustus Hansberry (a prominent real estate broker)
and Nannie Louise Perry, and niece of the Africanist Professor
William Leo Hansberry, after whom the Hansberry Institute of
African Studies in the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Nigeria,
was named. She grew up on the south side of Chicago in the
Woodlawn neighborhood.
The family moved into an all-white
neighborhood, where they faced racial discrimination. Hansberry
attended a mostly white public school while her parents fought
against segregation. Hansberry's father engaged in a legal
battle against a racially restrictive covenant that attempted to
prohibit African-American families from buying homes in the
area. The legal struggle over their move led to the landmark
Supreme Court case Hansberry v. Lee, 311 U.S. 32 (1940). Though
victorious in the Supreme Court, Hansberry's family was
subjected to what Hansberry would later ironically describe as a
"warm and cuddly white neighborhood". This experience later
inspired her to write her most famous work, A Raisin in the
Sun..
Her family home at 6140 S. Rhodes Ave. has
since been designated a City of Chicago landmark.—
Wikipedia
* * * *
*
Weldon
Irvine on YouTube
Morning
Sunrise /
We gettin
down /
I love you /
Music is
the key /
Nursery
Rhyme Song
Boogie
Down It's Funky /
Jungle
Juice /
Gloria /
Here's
Where I Came In /
Legendary Weldon Irvine's beautiful composition,
"Here's Where I Came In": it is touching, poignant, and
heartbreaking.
Misty
Dawn /
Weldon
Irvine raps at West End NYC 96 /
Sexy Eyes
* * *
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Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the
Making of the New Negro
By
Barbara Foley
Foley's book is a lucid
and useful one... A heavyweight
intervention, it prompts significant
rethinking of the ideological and
representational strategies structuring the
era.—Journal
of American Studies
Foley
does a masterful job of analyzing the racial
and political theories of a wide range of
black and white figures, from the radical
Left to the racist Right... Students of
African American political and cultural
history in the early twentieth century
cannot ignore this book. Essential.—Choice
In our
current time of crisis, when ruling classes
busily promote nationalism and racism to
conceal the class nature of their
inter-imperialist rivalries, one can only
hope that readers will not be daunted by
Foley's dedication to analyzing the
ideological milieu of the 1920s that
contributed to the eclipse of New Negro
radicalism by New Negro nationalism.—Science
& Society
|
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 |
Harlem Cultural Political Movements
1960-1970, From Malcolm X (Black Is Beautiful)
By Klytus Smith, Abiola Sinclair, Hannibal Ahmed
Abiola Sinclair, 56,
Amsterdam News columnist, dies.
Final rites for Abiola Sinclair, a former
Amsterdam News columnist, were held Wednesday,
March 21, at Unity Funeral Home, Frederick Douglass
Boulevard and West 126th Street. Sinclair, who was
also publisher of Black History Magazine,
died at Mount Sinai Hospital on March 16, following
her admission to the medical center in late January.
She was 56 years old. |
Sinclair reportedly was
suffering from walking pneumonia, which friends said she didn't
know she had for some time. In addition, Sinclair had a
long-term heart condition.—J. Zamgba Browne,
New York Amsterdam News, 28 March 2001.
* *
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|
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
|
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As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
* * * * *
 |
Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.”
|
Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style
that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this
isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys
something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost
* * * * *
|
Ancient, Ancient: Short Fiction
By Kiini Ibura Salaam
Ancient, Ancient collects the short fiction by Kiini Ibura Salaam, of which acclaimed author and critic Nalo Hopkinson writes, ''Salaam treats words like the seductive weapons they are. She wields them to weave fierce, gorgeous stories that stroke your sensibilities, challenge your preconceptions, and leave you breathless with their beauty.'' Indeed, Ms. Salaam's stories are so permeated with sensuality that in her introduction to
Ancient, Ancient, Nisi Shawl, author of the award-winning Filter House, writes, ''Sexuality-cum-sensuality is the experiential link between mind and matter, the vivid and eternal refutation of the alleged dichotomy between them. This understanding is the foundation of my 2004 pronouncement on the burgeoning sexuality implicit in sf's Afro-diasporization. It is the core of many African-based philosophies. And it is the throbbing, glistening heart of Kiini's body of work. This book is alive. Be not afraid.''
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Karma’s Footsteps
By Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
Somebody has to tell the truth sometime, whatever that truth may be. In this, her début full collection, Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie offers up a body of work that bears its scars proudly, firm in the knowledge that each is evidence of a wound survived. These are songs of life in all its violent difficulty and beauty; songs of fury, songs of love. 'Karma's Footsteps' brims with things that must be said and turns the volume up, loud, giving silence its last rites. "Ekere Tallie's new work 'Karma's Footsteps' is as fierce with fight songs as it is with love songs. Searing with truths from the modern day world she is unafraid of the twelve foot waves that such honesties always manifest. A poet who "refuses to tiptoe" she enters and exits the page sometimes with short concise imagery, sometimes in the arms of delicate memoir. Her words pull the forgotten among us back into the lightning of our eyes.—Nikky Finney /
Ekere Tallie Table
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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